Hey everyone! As you know, the summer schedule has been a bit hectic and the tips have been coming on a somewhat more erratic schedule than usual. Well, hopefully that will improve a bit over the coming weeks…I played my last date of the tour on friday (which included a tag-team workshop with the unstoppable ill.Gates), and finally released the new hobotech mix (download it now!).
So, without any further ado, here are a few thoughts that I’ve accumulated from the batch of performances I’ve done over the last couple of months.
1) Don’t change your template or controller setup unless something is really, really broken. Look at your set the way a programmer might look at a piece of software. Is the thing you want to change a critical bug fix or an enhancement? Many things are somewhere in-between. Personally, once I’m into a run of shows, the only thing I’m going to change are the critical bug fixes. Your setup is an instrument that you want to be a virtuoso at performing with. Sometimes, you gotta leave it alone so you can focus on improving your skills as a performer.
2) Err to the side of simplicity. I already wrote about this in Simplify Your Setup, but I feel even more strongly about it now. Before I hit the road I almost talked myself into adding an extra controller to my setup (to trigger samples, do some extra real-time glitching, etc.) and I am so glad I didn’t. Why? because looking back I didn’t miss it at all. Again, there’s this gulf between what you imagine you will do on the gig and what you will actually do.
Also, after playing this series of shows I discovered several relatively ineffective knobs & buttons that I hardly used at all. The upshot? I’ll be able to do everything I wanted to do by modifying my existing setup instead of adding another controller. (now that I’ve got a break before my next round of shows.)
3) Bring extra EVERYTHING. What can I say? We all know this and yet somehow fall short. Buy an extra power supply for your computer. Get extra audio cables and data cables. Obviously, we don’t all have the budget to buy extra interfaces, controllers and computers. Dang.
